Thursday, May 31, 2007

The Asian Art Museum here isn't exactly what you'd call contemporary. Its last exhibit from Japan was of 18th-century screen paintings, and even that was considered pretty recent. But this summer, the museum is jumping into modern culture with an interactive exhibit of the works of Osamu Tezuka, routinely referred to as "the god of manga."

Many Americans have seen Astro Boy on TV, but this is the first time manga and anime fans in the United States are being exposed to the artistic genius of its creator. It's not always easy for foreign audiences to understand why manga is so important to the Japanese, but the museum hopes that the exhibit will provide a little perspective.

A new Japanese robot twists and rolls to iPod tunes in an intricate dance based on complex mathematics, a technology developers said will one day enable robots to move about spontaneously instead of following preprogrammed motions.

Equipped with Kenwood Corp. speaker systems, Tokyo-based venture ZMP Inc.'s 14-inch long Miuro robot — which looks like a white ball wedged between two halves of an egg — wheels about in time with music from an iPod portable player, which locks into the machine.

At a demonstration in Tokyo on Thursday, the 11-pound Miuro pivoted about on a stage in time to beats of a pop music track. Its dance wasn't preprogrammed, but generated by the robot itself.

Scientists involved in the robot's development believe the technology could one day lead to robots capable of spontaneous motion. Miuro uses algorithms, or mathematical rules, to analyze music and translate the beats into dances, according to ZMP President Hisashi Taniguchi.

...the new prototype is fitted with software based on what scientists call chaotic itinerancy, a mathematical pattern similar to the movements of a bee circling from flower to flower as it collects nectar.

That allows the new Miuro to act spontaneously and unpredictably — "just like a child playing," said Tokyo University researcher Takashi Ikegami, who developed the software.

The 108,800 yen ($895) original Miuro can also receive wireless signals from a personal computer to play iTunes and other stored digital files.

...NFL quarterback Tony Romo has told Underwood that he wants to bench their relationship during the football season, according to the National Enquirer. Football season begins in September and lasts until January.

“Carrie thought that they were moving closer to a more committed relationship,” a source tells the tab. Romo asked Underwood to give him space for his career once before, and she did, but this time, the request has hit a sour note with her, says the source, who adds, “Carrie wants a firm commitment from Tony.”

Microsoft Surface is a gesture based touch panel interface that lets you 'grab' digital information with your hands, interacting with content by touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard. The UI is multi-touch aware, so it can understand gestures like zooming into a photo with two fingers.

Surface can be used by multiple users at the same time enabling you to perform collaborative tasks. The coffee table computer also recognizes physical objects when placed on the screen.

Windows Vista only offers "marginal security advantages over XP" according to tests completed by CRN. "Vista remains riddled with holes, despite its multilayer security architecture and embedded security tools." The report's findings are mixed and at times a little unfair, but it does demonstrate the problems that Microsoft has to face—technical and otherwise.

The report faults Vista for "providing no improvement in virus protection vs. XP," but of course Windows Vista does not ship with antivirus software—something the reviewer fails to mention. Faulting an AV-less Vista for not stopping viruses is a bit like faulting a door without a lock for opening when the handle is twisted. Any business that is deploying Vista (or XP) without an antivirus solution is, of course, out of its mind.

In a few years, skim milk may come straight from the cow, it was reported this week.

Skim milk is usually produced by taking all of the fat out of regular milk, but in 2001, researchers found a cow that skipped that step. While screening a herd of cows, they found one with a natural gene mutation that makes her produce lower-fat milk than a normal cow.

Marge, as researchers later named her, makes milk that has 1 percent fat (as compared to 3.5 percent in whole milk) and is high in omega-3 fatty acids. And remarkably, Marge’s low-fat milk still has the same delicious taste as conventionally produced low-fat milk, according to the report in Chemistry & Industry magazine.

The low saturated fat content of Marge’s milk also means that butter made from it is spreadable right out of the fridge, while most butter has to come to room temperature before it can be spread on toast.

After researchers found that Marge’s daughters also produced low-fat milk, they surmised that the genetic trait was dominant and planned to breed herds of skim milk-producing cows.

A new study into the mental skills required to read a map has handed blokes new ammunition and dealt heterosexual women a final indignity.

The research, from the University of Warwick in the UK, suggests that not only are straight women worse at map reading than straight males, they are also outperformed by bisexual men, gay men, gay women and bisexual women - in that order.

The study looked at what's called mental rotation. This is our ability to mentally visualise an object from different perspectives.

Applied to real life, the most practical example of mental rotation is map reading, says Dr Michael Tlauka, an expert in gender differences and spatial ability from Flinders University.

This is one mental task where studies have shown that men consistently outperform women, Dr Tlauka says.

"It is absolutely true that mental rotation is the task of all spatial tasks where you get the biggest sex difference," he says.

"Men tend to be much better at mental rotation than women."

He says the old chestnut about men being better map readers than women is actually rooted in fact.

"It's not a myth at all - map reading and spatial skills in general, you'll find that men outperform women."

All of a sudden the Milky Way is filling up with far-off solar systems never seen before -- more and more planets of all shapes and sizes, wheeling in orbits around their own sunlike stars.

Astronomers on teams from UC Berkeley and Australia reported the discovery of 28 new planets all at once on Monday, and their leader -- working through the night all this week at the world's biggest telescope in Hawaii -- is now on the hunt for rocky planets that might resemble Earth.

"An overarching question now is whether our own solar system is really alone," said Geoffrey Marcy, the Berkeley astronomer whose team has led in the discovery of what are now widely known as "exoplanets."

Marcy and many of his colleagues are in Honolulu for a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and in telephone interviews and e-mails he said he and Katie Peek, 26, a Berkeley graduate student, are scanning 70 more stars right now to seek still more of the increasingly common objects.

"It's all most amazing and fascinating," Jason Wright, a Berkeley postdoctoral fellow, said in a telephone conversation. He and colleague John Asher Johnson described the group's findings in detail at the astronomy meeting.

The 28 planets they and their Anglo-Australian colleagues reported bring the total number of exoplanets discovered to 236 since the first one was detected barely a dozen years ago, and now the rush is on.

The two teams reporting Monday said that besides the 28 planets they discovered during the past year, they also found seven brown dwarfs -- huge and strange objects much larger than Jupiter that are called "failed stars" because they never grew to a size and mass big enough to turn on their nuclear fires and blaze forth as true stars.

The Empire State Building melts in the hands of prominent net artist Mark Napier. His custom code gives the iconic skyscraper a new look for the digital age, while reminding viewers that software, not steel, is the new medium of power.

A trained painter, Napier spent 20 years working as a software developer, and he's been coding his designs exclusively for the web since 1995. As one of the net's first breakthrough artists, his digital creations have gone on to appear in top-tier terrestrial museums like the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The previous record, set by a 18th-19th century Chinese throne, was 477,900 US dollars in New York in 2004.

A pair of tiny famille rose bowls also went under the hammer Tuesday for 50.72 million Hong Kong dollars, beating the previous record of nine million dollars set a decade ago. They had been estimated at 30 million dollars.

The 14-centimeter (5.5-inch) bowls from the Yongzheng period (1723-1735) decorated with peaches growing on branches were bought by London art dealer Eskenazi Ltd.

The two items were among the 90 items sold on Tuesday at the Imperial Sale and among hundreds of lots which are going under the hammer at the four-day Asian art sale.

A 20-year-old dancer from Japan was crowned Miss Universe 2007 on Monday night, marking only the second time her country has won the world beauty title.

Dressed in a black, red and purple Japanese-style gown, Riyo Mori nervously grabbed the hands of first runner-up, Natalia Guimaraes of Brazil, just before the winner was announced. Then she threw her hands up and covered her mouth, overcome with emotion.

But she gathered herself together enough to catch the diamond-and-pearl-studded headpiece valued at $250,000 as it slipped off her head when Miss Universe 2006 Zuleyka Rivera of Puerto Rico crowned her. Mori immediately placed it back on her head.

The last time Japan won the pageant was in 1959 when Akiko Kojima became the first Miss Universe from Asia.

The last place anyone would expect to find fish is Devil's Hole, a chasm in the middle of the Mojave Desert where a 100-degree day is mild and the only thing bigger than the rocky expanse of desert is the sky above it.

But nature is nothing if not amazing -- as good an explanation as any of how the Devil's Hole pupfish has survived in the bottomless geothermal pool that gave the fish its name. It is tiny, just an inch long, yet few species loom so large in the history of American environmentalism.

The Devil's Hole pupfish is one of the rarest animals in the world. The seemingly endless effort to save it laid the foundation for the Endangered Species Act and shaped Western water policy a generation ago with a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

But after 20,000 years in the desert, the fish teeters on the edge of extinction. No more than 42 remain in Devil's Hole.

The Devil's Hole pupfish has been the beneficiary of one of the most aggressive campaigns ever to preserve a species, an effort every bit as intense as those to save the bald eagle and California condor. The Endangered Species Act requires nothing less. But saving the pupfish is more than a legal obligation for the biologists and bureaucrats involved.

An Indian zoologist said Monday he has found a new species of limbless lizard in a forested area in the country's east. "Preliminary scientific study reveals that the lizard belongs to the genus Sepsophis," said Sushil Kumar Dutta, who led a team of researchers from "Vasundhra," a non-governmental organization, and the North Orissa University.

The newly found 7-inch long lizard looks like a scaly, small snake, Dutta said. "It prefers to live in a cool retreat, soft soil and below stones."

"The lizard is new to science and is an important discovery. It is not found anywhere else in the world," Dutta told The Associated Press. He is the head of the zoology department of the North Orissa University in the eastern Indian town of Baripada.

While modern snakes and lizards are derived from a common evolutionary ancestor, they belong today to two entirely separate groups of animals, or orders. Snakes, over millenia, gradually lost their limbs and developed their characteristic forms of locomotion. But modern limbless lizards are not snakes, Dutta said.

The lizard was found 10 days ago during a field study in the forested region of Khandadhar near Raurkela in Orissa state, about 625 miles southeast of New Delhi, he said.

Lindsay Lohan was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence Saturday after her convertible struck a curb, and investigators found what they believe is cocaine at the scene, police said.

Lohan, 20, and two other people were in her 2005 Mercedes SL-65 when it crashed on Sunset Boulevard around 5:30 a.m., Sgt. Mike Foxen said. It appeared the actress was speeding, Lt. Mitch McCann said at an afternoon news conference.

Officers at the scene found a "usable amount" of a drug tentatively identified as cocaine, McCann said. He declined to say where the drug was found other than to say Lohan was not carrying it.

Lohan, who spent time at a rehabilitation center earlier this year, was driven in another car to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries, McCann said. The two other people in her car were not hurt.

Officers received a 911 call about the accident and arrested Lohan at the hospital for investigation of misdemeanor driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, McCann said.

She was released from custody because she was admitted to the hospital, police said.

McCann declined to comment on Lohan's blood-alcohol level. He said the case will be presented to the District Attorney's Office where the actress could face more charges, including felonies. Her tentative arraignment date is Aug. 24.

The crash was Lohan's third accident in about two years. In October 2005, Lohan and a passenger received minor injuries when her convertible hit a van in West Hollywood. Authorities said the van driver, who also received minor injuries, was at fault.

Sunday, May 27, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO: Google on Wednesday launched a test version of a translation tool that enables people to search the Internet in any of a dozen languages and have the results converted into their chosen tongue.

A beta version of Google's "cross-language information retrieval" feature is online at http://translate.google.com/translate_s.

The service "in effect, will make the Web universal", Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing it to the press at the Internet search giant's campus in Mountain View, California, last week.

"We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages," Manber said. "The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there."

Google's new software translates queries to perform multi-lingual searches of the Internet and then converts the results to a searcher's language.

The languages included in the service are French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and simplified Chinese. link

Along with the mounting concern over landfill sites rapidly running out of space comes a new worry that the same thing is happening to Britain's graveyards. Even though over 50% of the population choose to be cremated after death, approximately 300,000 people are buried each year. It is estimated that graveyards will run out of space by 2009.

Environmental ministers have been discussing ways of alleviating the problem. Initial plans to dig graves deeper and stack coffins on top of each other have been rejected as being too distressing for the families. In death a person could find himself lying forever atop someone he hated in life.

Scientists now believe that the only solution is to recycle dead bodies. They claim that hair could be used to make wigs, teeth could be used in implants (saving recipients the cost of expensive crowns), artificial joints such as hip replacements could be re-used (saving the NHS money) and even breast implants could be cleaned up and re-used. Bones could be turned into first class fertilizer and flesh used in dog food. link

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